The Trout

It is surprising that the swansongs or the penultimate works of eminent directors, often their favorites, are dismissed by many critics. Examples: Zinnemann's "Five Days, One Summer," Lean's "Ryan's Daughter." One can add Losey's "The Trout" to that list. All of Losey's works looked at social and economic disparities--"The Trout" underscores that. Audiences who rave about the Korean film "Parasites" might not notice the similarities in this French work because the messages are subtler. Additionally it is a women's film made by a male, where all the male characters are found wanting except for an elderly Japanese man. It is also a fascinating study of a woman's love for her husband who is gay.

The last conversation in the film: Q to Frederique (Ms Huppert): It is better than in France?

Frederique: It is the same. But Galuchat (Frederique's husband) is in charge.

Those closing lines are spoken with the liquor-addicted Galuchat walking alone with a glass of alcohol outside the restaurant, while his wife has transformed from a village girl of limited means into an incredibly successful international trout farmer. The "trout eggs" have hatched! A small detail that might escape many--towards the end as rich trout farmers from around the world, including Frederique, arrive at the Japanese hotel in a long convoy of limousines, the only sound one hears are the closing of the limousine doors (recalling the final scene of Losey's "Accident" when you don't see the accident but hear it on the soundtrack!)

La Truite opens to the unedifying sight of a glum-faced Isabelle Huppert squeezing sperm out of a dead fish. No prizes, then, for guessing this is a drama of sexual dysfunction. Huppert has a homosexual husband (Jacques Spiesser) who is unable to consummate their union. (Nor is he able to act, incidentally, but in a film this bad that is no grounds for divorce.)

Naive souls may imagine that a severe lack of sex explains the scowl of dour misery that Huppert tries to pass off as a performance. Not a bit of it! Her character made a vow in her teens to leech everything she could out of men - without ever once gratifying their sexual desires. So when two mega-rich businessmen (Daniel Olbrychski and Jean-Pierre Cassel) just happen to wander into her local bowling alley and find her simply irresistible...

Sorry, but I don't know which is more improbable. Members of the style-conscious haute bourgeoisie going bowling, or any person - male or female, gay or straight - becoming obsessed with Isabelle Huppert. If Losey had only shot this film with Brigitte Bardot back in the 60s (as he longed to do) then we might just about buy into its ludicrous plot. Given the sour-faced Huppert and her gaping charisma deficit, he was a fool even to try.

La Truite is a textbook illustration of the melodramatic bathos and aesthetic self-abuse that Losey could fall into when he didn't have Harold Pinter (or some other ace script-writer) to keep him in line. Only a hypnotic Jeanne Moreau (as Cassel's aging and ill-treated wife) does anything that resembles acting. Spare a thought, though, for the stunning Afro-Caribbean dancer Lisette Malidor - wasted here in a minor role. In any sane universe, she could have played Huppert's part.

I am obligated to practice French as part of language acquisition. (So I had a reason to watch this film). I feel it was a really good and interesting film. It is a story that is different than what we would see in the United States. It is very French.

It was interesting to observe the main character's life on a trout farm. For fun, the family goes out bowling with other another family. They also go to many early 80s French and Japanese discotheques. It was really interesting.

I think I need to watch the film again because there were certain sequences that were hard for me to follow. The ending was really good, I thought. I also felt the performances by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Cassel, could have been Oscar-nominated.

In conclusion, with French films, they cast actors who Act the roles really well, even if they have smaller shoulders or no butt. Whereas American films cast gorgeous people, who may not be as advanced as actors. I feel this film is worth watching, and different from American films.

In LA TRUITE Isabelle Huppert plays a cold-blooded trout of a woman, Frédérique, supported by Jeanne Moreau as a wife whose husband, Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), throws himself (repeatedly) at Frédérique. Frédérique, who is married to a gay husband (Jacques Spiesser) agrees to accompany Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) to Tokyo, as much to annoy Rambert as to torment Saint-Genis.

The movie has many luscious sequences in Tokyo and France, and Huppert acts most of the other protagonists off the screen in a difficult role. There are flashbacks of her learning how her father and his friends used women, which increases her resolve not to be abused in similar fashion. She comes across as outwardly unsympathetic, but we understand her motives in a world where rich people treat those around them with the same lack of concern as they do their possessions. Rambert is even less sympathetic and less capable of love than Frédérique.

In this slow-moving narrative style definitely assumes more significance than content, but the film does have a particularly satisfactory ending.

Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.